Rema Ghuloum: Energy Work

My paintings emerge out of the process of slowly building up the surface with thin stains of paint and sanding in between to preserve the previous layers,” Ghuloum writes. “Pattern and shapes come into being through this process. I create a surface that breathes and remembers.” Ghuloum’s vibrant works are in a continual state of becoming, not pinned down, with a sense of color and space that is always shifting and transforming.

Ghuloum’s experiential, intensely physical works combine technical skill, rich emotion, and the willingness to take risks - core values at the heart of art-making. She comments, “I do not really know what the painting will be initially. I am always trying to create contrasts within each work. I ask, ‘Is the painting dense, or is it more ethereal or atmospheric? Does space expand and contract?’ I think about what my works can do or evoke. They are not static.”

In the process of making her works, Ghuloum’s responds to the work experientially as it is formed; in some sense, her style combines the opticality of high-modernism and the expression of post-war abstraction. Informing this subtle relation is the contrast in Ghuloum’s paintings between the deep space of their centers, and the more shallow one at their edges. “The edges reflect the history of my process,” she notes. “At the end of every work session, I apply the remaining paint on my palette loosely around the edge with a palette knife or various brushes as another way to record time.”

Rema Ghuloum’s work focuses her viewer on the present, while at the same time questioning how that experience is ordered by the past. Her works are generous and robust. They offer us an opportunity to navigate vision with both eye and spirit, to sense both our own presence before her works, and the pictorial one she has crafted.